"People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers." ---Neil deGrasse Tyson
This article is the first in a series of articles I plan to write (depending on my available time and interest) objectively examining popular biblical stories to establish their veracity or likelihood of having actually occurred. While many people might view the stories as fables and allegories, some do view them as actual, literal events that have occurred (Looking at you Ken Hamm, lol). These stories have significantly influenced people and societies throughout the centuries. So I will analyze the empirical evidence which either supports or refutes the stories as portrayed. For this Part 1, I will examine the biblical Great Flood and Noah's Ark mythos.
In a nutshell, the Great Flood/Noah's Ark goes like this: God was ticked off at humanity's shenanigans and decided the best way to deal with the situation was genocide via mass drowning (save for Noah & few of his followers, along with certain animals). So God instructed Noah to gather two of every animal and build a great ark to house them during the 40-day/night deluge that would flood the world and kill virtually every living thing on the planet. Afterwards, he would release the animals and themselves to repopulate their respective species.
This story has so many problems with it, it's difficult to know where to begin. To simplify, I will not be focusing on other cultures earlier flood myths, which probably influenced the creation of the biblical flood myth. Neither will I be focusing on God's own imperfection (or incompetence), as his Creation had some major design flaws forcing him to essentially reboot Creation over again. I also won't delve into the implausibility of rapid repopulation over a short time after the flood either. So here are some problems with the Flood story:
1.
The sheer number of animals that had to be aboard the Ark : For this, I'm going to assume that the animals on the ark were all land animals. According to the
California Academy of Sciences, there are approximately 6.5 million species of land animals. I'll be conservative and round down to 6 million, give or take a million. Since we have two of every animal, the ark must be capable of holding and supporting
12 MILLION animals for an extended duration, without additional support. That alone makes the Flood story quite implausible (even more so if one includes dinosaurs as passengers). Anyone who has been in a pet store will know housing many animals takes up quite a lot of space and resources. To put that into perspective, a single adult elephant (the largest land mammal in the world) can weigh upwards of 14,000 pounds, grow up to 35 feet long, and eat 200-600 pounds of food and drink 50 gallons of water PER DAY! And Noah had 12 million animals to feed and water daily, which is an impossible task for the relatively few people aboard the ark (never mind cleaning up after the animals too). In addition, it is supposed to believed that many of those animals traveled thousands of miles, some over the ocean, and from remote places like Antarctica, outside of their natural environments and ecosystems, in time to board the ark before the flood. Really?
